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Astrophysics > High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena

Title:
Evidence for Gamma-ray Jets in the Milky Way

Abstract: Although accretion onto supermassive black holes in other galaxies is seen to
produce powerful jets in X-ray and radio, no convincing detection has ever been
made of a kpc-scale jet in the Milky Way. The recently discovered pair of 10
kpc tall gamma-ray bubbles in our Galaxy may be a sign of earlier jet activity
from the central black hole. In this paper, we identify a gamma-ray cocoon
feature in the southern bubble, a jet-like feature along the cocoon's axis of
symmetry, and another directly opposite the Galactic center in the north. Both
the cocoon and jet-like feature have a hard spectrum with spectral index ~ -2
from 1 to 100 GeV, with a cocoon luminosity of (5.5 +/- 0.45) x 10^35 erg/s and
luminosity of the jet-like feature of (1.8 +/- 0.35) x 10^35 erg/s at 1 to 100
GeV. If confirmed, these jets are the first resolved gamma-ray jets ever seen.